DI-145 Data Acquisition Starter Kit Developer's Diary

2/16/2011 Note #14 Defining the DI-145 Protocol (Part 1 of 2)

The primary mission of the DI-145 Data Acquisition Starter Kit, as with all of our starter kits, is to expose the universe of instrumentation users to our WinDaq software. It does that quite nicely, but there's always a subset of adventurous individuals who want to use the device with their own program. Lately, we've even seen more and more such individuals of the Linux flavor for whom our standard programming tools offer no solution. So, in response to this collection of creative coders we've decided to publish the DI-145's protocol, the nuts and bolts command and response set that occurs over the USB port. Armed with the protocol anyone with even a modicum of programming talent can communicate with and fold the DI-145 within the neat confines of their own application. The protocol will be published in two parts. Part one is currently available and deals with the legacy protocol that makes the DI-145 backward compatible with its predecessor, the DI-194RS. Available in a future release is Part two, which will expose the DI-145's enhanced command set.